I think  there is a  misunderstanding about DISTRIBUTE, its  purpose, and
its future. It  is NOT a mechanism to make  other, wealthier/nicer people
take care of your deliveries (at  least not unless explicitly set up this
way,  as in  the case  of a  unix server  doing the  deliveries for  a VM
system; presumably when this happens the  owner of the target machine has
agreed to the  intended usage). The purpose of DISTRIBUTE  is to conserve
bandwidth and improve delivery delays by doing the following:
 
1. Have  each organization  receive only  ONE copy  of any  bulk delivery
   message meant  for multiple  recipients at that  organization (usually
   the recipients  are on  multiple hosts). This  is not  "other people's
   traffic", this is traffic destined to your users. You're going to have
   to process it anyway;  you might as well do so  in an efficient manner
   and minimize  the load  on your external  lines. This  is particularly
   important outside of  the US and for smaller  organizations that can't
   afford a T1 at $35k/year or so.
 
2. Provide  a second level  of optimization by  doing the same  thing for
   "regions" and ensuring that only one  copy of the message is ever sent
   to each  region. A  region would  be a  group of  computers, typically
   connected to other regions via an expensive line. A typical example is
   an  academic network  outside the  US, or  a service  provider. It  is
   clearly in the interest of such  providers to squeeze as much value as
   possible from their trunk lines and to provide the best possible level
   of service to their customers.
 
The implementation in  LISTSERV-NJE, being based on  the BITNET topology,
generates too many  hops. In practice it's  not so bad, but  the point is
that  this is  not the  target for  the LISTSERV-TCP/IP  backbone of  the
future. The target is one DISTRIBUTE server per organization and then one
(or  a  few)  server  per  region, with  sub-regions  if  appropriate.  A
DISTRIBUTE-only license costs  on the order of $500-600/year  for unix or
VMS, which should hardly be an obstacle to any regional organization. The
only reason we're charging for it is  that this is about what it costs us
to answer questions and help people  with problems. We don't want to pipe
large  amounts of  mail through  servers for  which there  is no  support
agreement. Technically  you could use  the evaluation copies  of LISTSERV
for  that, and  they are  free, so  in fact  you can  already get  a free
DISTRIBUTE server if you positively have no money.
 
  Eric